Tech News Roundup: iPhone Duo Orders Slip to 2027, Microsoft’s 2.8T-Parameter AI, AI Bug Hunts Delay Postgres 19 & More (Oct 16, 2026)
Friday’s tech news has Apple’s foldable selling out fast and AI changing how software ships. iPhone Duo preorders opened and delivery dates slid into 2027 within an hour, the first Nvidia RTX Spark laptops (Surface Laptop Ultra included) got real tests, Microsoft finished pre-training a 2.8-trillion-parameter model, and AI code reviewers found so many bugs that Postgres 19 got pushed back. Add Meta’s new AI-scraping terms and its smart glasses recording without a wake word, Anthropic opening its doors to outside safety testers, Blue Origin’s $330M New Glenn push, Microsoft Defender coming to Linux desktops, a fake WhatsApp in the Play Store, KDE’s 30th birthday, and more. Here’s the Lanbrew tech roundup for October 16, 2026.
Update: iPhone Duo preorders opened — and delivery dates slipped into 2027 within an hour
Yesterday we noted that preorders for Apple’s first foldable were about to open; here’s what happened. Apple started taking iPhone Duo orders at 8AM ET Friday, and in less than an hour delivery estimates on Apple’s site slid to late January for every configuration, The Verge reports. The Duo, which starts at $1,999 for 256GB in “star white” and “night sky,” still lands in Apple Stores on October 23, and Apple usually holds back some in-store stock, so walking in may beat ordering online. It isn’t clear yet whether the wait comes from heavy demand, tight supply, or both.
Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops get their first real tests, Surface Laptop Ultra included
Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Ultra earlier this month; now the reviews are in. Three Verge writers spent a week with five RTX Spark machines — the Surface Laptop Ultra, Asus ProArt P16, Lenovo Yoga 9n, and HP OmniBook Ultra — built on Nvidia’s Arm-based N1X chip with up to 20 CPU cores and 6,144 CUDA cores, priced from $2,599.99 up to $6,999.99. Everyday Windows-on-Arm apps mostly just worked, and the GPU tied a top-spec M5 Max in a Blender render, but Apple’s CPUs are still far stronger and even a 12-core M6 Mac mini keeps pace in multicore tests. Ars Technica’s Surface review lands in the same place: impressive hardware that ran a 70-billion-parameter model locally and played AAA games, with software and Copilot+ features still catching up.
Microsoft finishes pre-training MAI-Base-2, a 2.8-trillion-parameter AI model
Microsoft AI says it has completed pre-training MAI-Base-2, a mixture-of-experts foundation model with 80 billion active and 2.8 trillion total parameters, trained on 16,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs over 38 days in August and September. The company claims it beats every open-weight model it tested on its held-out evaluations and is 4–12x more pre-training-efficient than DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base. Microsoft says the model was built on organic data with no distillation from other models, which lets it license the weights to trusted partners through Foundry. MAI-Base-2 is now in post-training, with no release date yet.
Postgres 19 is delayed because AI code reviewers found more bugs than humans could fix
PostgreSQL 19, once due in late September or early October, is now expected around November 19, and developers have pulled eight to 10 major features, including SQL/PGQ property graph queries. Leading committer Peter Eisentraut says some reverted features had real architectural problems, but LLM-assisted code review also surfaced a long tail of small edge-case bugs that once would have trickled out over years — “you’re staring at a list of forty defect reports,” and the clock runs out. He stresses this isn’t about vibe coding, since most of the features were written before that was an option. The pulled features should land in PostgreSQL 20 instead.
Meta’s new business terms may let it train AI on news sites for free
Meta’s updated commercial terms, which take effect October 30, authorize it to crawl and scrape websites “associated” with businesses that promote content on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, and to use that content to “train” its AI products, Nieman Lab reports. Legal experts say that could let Meta argue its terms override robots.txt blocks, which would sweep in news publishers that haven’t signed licensing deals. Meta says it is only “consolidating” its ad terms, that nothing has changed in how it uses crawlers, and that robots.txt still works.
Meta admits its smart glasses briefly recorded audio without the wake phrase
A Reddit user noticed their Ray-Ban Meta glasses saving audio recordings and transcripts of conversations to the Meta AI app without “Hey Meta” being said, and saw it happen on three pairs across the 2nd- and 3rd-gen models, with others reporting the same. Meta told Android Authority the issue “has been resolved” and that people can review and delete their voice logs in settings, but it hasn’t said what caused the bug. It’s the latest privacy headache for smart glasses, which some courtrooms in the UK and New York no longer allow.
Anthropic gives outside safety testers METR employee-level access
Anthropic is setting up three tiers of independent evaluators, from narrowly scoped risk investigations up to near-employee access, and nonprofit METR is in the top tier. Six METR staffers now have access to Anthropic hardware, offices, and tools “roughly on par” with its own risk teams, and they will publish what they find about its risk levels, incidents, and practices; Anthropic says it isn’t funding METR’s work. SecureBio joins in the first tier to review the chemical and biological weapons section of Anthropic’s August risk report, and early talks are underway with Hugging Face.
Blue Origin plans a $330M Florida expansion to fly New Glenn multiple times a week
Blue Origin says it will add two more New Glenn launch and landing pads, plus a $330 million expansion of its Rocket Park campus in Cape Canaveral, due in summer 2027, that can build up to 150 upper stages a year. It’s also building a customer integration facility with the U.S. Space Force so it can prepare several missions at once, with the goal of “multiple flights per week by the end of the decade.” The company is still working to get New Glenn flying again by the end of 2026 after a rocket exploded on the pad in May.
China proposes export controls on its own AI models, agents and computing clusters
China has proposed export controls covering 23 domestically developed AI technologies, including models, agents, and computing clusters, citing national security, Reuters reports. The commerce ministry says the rules would help limit misuse such as AI that generates and deploys autonomous malware against civilian infrastructure. API access for individual users would stay available and existing open-source licenses would be respected. The proposal also covers solar and biotech; Chinese firms could license these technologies abroad but not sell the underlying IP.
UK competition regulator proposes special oversight of Microsoft’s business software
Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority proposed designating Microsoft with “strategic market status” in business software, which could open the door to rules on how it bundles products like Excel, Teams, and Copilot. The CMA found Microsoft holds a strong position in areas including PC operating systems and productivity suites, and that customers face barriers when switching. It is also looking at AI tool choice, security bundling, and cloud licensing, and will make a final decision by February. Microsoft says it doesn’t share the CMA’s views and that its products, including Copilot, are open and interoperable.
Read on Reuters (via Yahoo Finance) →
Microsoft is bringing Defender to Linux desktops
Microsoft has released Defender for Linux Workstations in public preview, extending Defender for Endpoint’s antivirus, detection, vulnerability management, device isolation, and inventory tools to Linux desktops. It needs Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 or Microsoft 365 E5/E7, supports distros such as RHEL, Ubuntu LTS, SUSE, and Oracle Linux, and works like Defender on Linux servers, so there’s no separate desktop agent. Microsoft says more developers on Linux desktops makes them a bigger target for attackers.
A cyberattack on a BAE-run system has knocked out US bankruptcy court notices
The Administrative Office of the US Courts says a “cybersecurity incident” took the Bankruptcy Noticing Center offline, a system BAE Systems runs for the federal judiciary. Sites including bnc.uscourts.gov and notices.uscourts.gov are down, and the production and distribution of bankruptcy notices has stopped for courts nationwide. One Texas bankruptcy court says problems began October 9, and courts are still accepting filings, though notices and orders may be delayed. BAE says the incident is isolated to the BNC system.
A fake WhatsApp is showing up above the real one in the Play Store
A Reddit user spotted an impostor “WhatsApp Messenger” in a sponsored slot above the real app on Google Play, days after a Chrome clone was found. The fake copies WhatsApp’s icon, screenshots, and text, has passed 500,000 downloads, and its listing was still live at publication. Android Authority says it may be using Google Play’s Early Access program to hide public reviews that could warn people off. The real WhatsApp has more than 10 billion downloads and an Editor’s Choice badge, so check the developer before you tap install.
Gmail Live lets Google AI subscribers search their inbox by voice
Google’s Gmail Live is out of beta, letting you ask your inbox questions out loud, like “What’s my flight’s gate number?”, and get answers without digging through threads. Docs Live drafts documents using details from Gmail, Drive, Chat, and the web, and Keep Live turns spoken brain dumps into organized notes and lists. Gmail Live and Keep Live are rolling out this week to Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers, Docs Live is limited to Pro and Ultra, and Workspace business customers get them “soon.”
KDE turns 30 with Plasma 6.8 and says goodbye to X11 sessions
KDE marked its 30th anniversary with Plasma 6.8, a “30th Anniversary Edition” that drops support for starting native X11 sessions and goes all-in on Wayland. Older X11 apps still run through XWayland, and people who stay on Plasma 6.7 keep their sessions for now. The release adds Nvidia triple buffering by default, built-in Kup backups, a kscreenctl command-line display tool, a System Monitor that can pin processes to CPU cores, and a revamped remote desktop server with clipboard sync and an “Exclusive Mode.” KDE also put out a documentary to mark the occasion.
That’s the Lanbrew tech roundup for today. Check back tomorrow at 10am CT for the next one.
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